The Flame of Life

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Handley thought that to paint the soul of England you had first to paint the soul of Europe.

What shape the soul should take he wasn’t sure about. What colour the heart, what composition the mind, had yet to be transmuted into real paint and colour, pain and choler. It was no use relying on inspiration. You mixed the paint with your sweat of fear, perspiration of labour, blood of vision, and let the energy take the hindmost or the rindpest as your heart expanded, chose for you, and finally took over.

Stop and start, trial and error, he painted them all from the very beginning: emanations from the swamps of the dead in France and Belgium, poppy dung, Brecht music, German swamp songs, Elgar’s sewer-tunes, sadistic misery, cock-eyed teutonic intelligence, Ophelia in the mud of Passchendaele, Lady Morphine of Vimy Ridge, the Howling Crone of Hill 60, the Angel of Mons. Roses, the Lions and the Donkeys of the Somme: those flowers of the bowels still blooming in Picardy, hectares harrowed and sown and perpetuated in the bone and blood of all countries, the final international fraternisation of the battlefield where the corpses of the world unite because they had nothing to lose but their lives.

Handley’s large hut in the back of the garden served well as a studio, as far from the dog and bird noises of England as he could get. He slammed up a window to breathe fresh air, yet despite its advantages wished he still had the attic of his Lincolnshire house, where he could stand at an open window and contemplate throwing himself to his death if the painting didn’t go well. Thinking about suicide cleared the head.

Large sketch-books were full, drawings of landscapes in pencil and charcoal blocked by statistics and notes. Cartoons abounded, geopolitic maps and scrawls and crossings out, Piccasso and Haushoffer, enormous motorways traversing saps and wire and dugouts and a thousand interdenominational faces fixed in the pavé of the road leading to the front — those sacred spokes leading to the axel-hub of death.

He threw the book across the room. Inspiration drove him to work, to keep out the cut of its fangs — or it left him a while to belly-crawl off to pastures new. He walked up and down.

The unsettled wetness of summer weather, with its air of fecundity that had often inspired him in Lincolnshire, made for restlessness here, and gave a leg-ache that wouldn’t let him stand in one place. He burned to go, but didn’t know where. He longed to settle down into tranquil happiness, but didn’t know how. He wanted to work, but couldn’t.

Birds of summer sang in the trees. The house was busy. The grocer’s van was unloading by the back door. Bourgeois placid life was running its accustomed course. Life had to be lived, one way or another. You called it ‘bourgeois’ if it went on too long and started to rot your soul. They’d lived in Lincolnshire twenty years, and here in this place less than one, but already the gangrene was eating him in vital places. The only thing left was a career of crime, or to sleep till better feelings came.

He regretted not having gone to fetch Maricarmen from Dover, but he’d wanted Cuthbert out of the house so that they could bring in a constitution. Cuthbert’s voice would have gone against him, so he’d sacrificed a pleasant trip through London, and a possible visit to Lady Ritmeester. After an hour’s speech a near unanimous vote at the meeting had brought in a constitution, declaring Albert Handley to be president of the community, with the power of veto on any decision. Let Cuthbert unravel himself from that one. There was no point in not being clear about it. Any room for doubt and you’re being unfair to the rest of them. One must never shirk responsibility. At least there was that much satisfaction in life.

If one doesn’t face problems one might just as well go out and get a job as a milkman — which didn’t sound a bad scheme to him, though not at the moment. In the old days, when he’d got no money, such an idea would never have entered his mind, but he was so bored he’d consider anything. Even manipulating the community held no further fascination now that he’d won control of it, though he’d yet to see Cuthbert’s face when he got to know, and sit back to watch his futile machinations as he tried to alter the course of history. He couldn’t, and that was the joy of it. As long as you lived from day to day the filthy claws of time couldn’t get at you. Courage was all you needed.

Enid strode across the lawn from the house, and came up the garden steps towards his refuge and resting-place. Wind blew strands of her fair hair about, the most wayward being tucked ruthlessly into place as she pushed open the door.

So, he thought, standing by his half-finished picture, my long-wedded wife is going to make me eat wood for what I just did at the meeting. The ascent made her breathless. It’s summer, she thought. If it were spring I’d finish him off for what he did. He gave a finely chiselled smile that he hoped would not infuriate her, while knowing for certain that it would.

She stood by the door, holding it shut. ‘Why did you do it?’

There was no use denying it. ‘If a man can’t be boss of his own house, who can?’ he said lightly, hoping she would appreciate his jest.

‘It was running very well. We were happy — after our fashions, but you have to become President of the Handley Democratic Republic. You wanted to spite Cuthbert, but it’s a ridiculous way for a grown man to carry on.’

He picked up a palette knife, as if about to carve his initials on his chest: ‘Under Cuthbert,’ he said, ‘it would have gone Fascist. Or he’d have had us wallowing in Primitive Christian Nihilism in no time. He’s got no political sense whatsoever. He’s just interested in destroying the community. He as good as told me.’

She liked being in his studio, because not only was it so much part of him, but it often calmed her to be there, since it had all the tools and bric-à-brac, talent and smell of him, that he’d accumulated over twenty odd years. It meant as much to her as to him, those stacks of canvasses, paint and turps, paper and bits of old board, books and reproductions gone pale and shabby from flies and sunshine.

‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said.

It was her life as well as his, but now for the first time she realised that really it was only him and not her. In a sense he had everything and she had nothing — apart from him and the family, and herself, which was supposed to be everything but wasn’t.

He lit a cigarette, and a long thin cigar for himself.

‘If the community can’t hold together in spite of what Cuthbert can do against it,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t deserve to survive.’

‘It’s got to be protected,’ he said, ‘and that’s my job. It should be yours as well, but it seems you’re leaving it all to me. I owe it to Myra to look after it.’

‘The knight in shining armour,’ she jeered, swinging back. ‘You’re a bloody hypocrite right to the depths of your soul. That’s all that’s in you: hypocrisy, oceans of it, and the worst thing is that you love it because it stops you seeing anything. It’s blinded you in both bloody eyes!’

But she spoke as if every word injured her and not him. She stopped by a collage called ‘The Angel of Mons’ — a big old trench map he’d picked up in a junk shop, covered with photographs of soldiers ripped out of her family album and cut up — without asking. Sunset and blood colours smeared it at various angles — chaos around the eye of a cyclone, at which the only conflict was a matter of life and death. It was sharp and precise at the centre, and calm. All his paintings managed to be so much like himself that she didn’t know where he ended and the paintings began, a feeling which rubbed her to the bone.

‘You set your son on to me,’ he said, quietly enough. ‘It takes us back to the house of bloody Cadmus. It really is about time I slung my hook and packed this farce in. I’m tired of it. It’s eating me away. It’s hungry, that man-eating mouth you set loose inside me. Call it off, for God’s sake, before I become hollow and drop down dead like a pack of dust.’

To leave her and go would do him no good, to give into that dream that he dreamed every day, because to wilfully get it would be like a child having a great toy it had always wanted. He’d enjoy it for ten minutes and then wonder where the real and only life had gone. He knew more than Dawley about things like that.

‘Can I sit down, Albert?’

He pulled up a chair and one for himself, and placed them by the unlit stove. He was often afraid he’d gone too far in their arguments, but when he found he hadn’t he started in again.

‘It used to be so good between us,’ she said.

He tried to sound honest and reasonable. ‘It was all right. But we starved often enough so that the kids could eat. That wasn’t so good.’

‘I know. But we lived in our own house in Lincolnshire. We were on our own. I know this community idea is working, but it’s not the same, Albert. I still think how much better it used to be.’

He was calm about it. ‘John put paid to our life in Lincolnshire. He burned the house down.’

‘I wish you’d never met him.’

He jumped. ‘John was my brother.’

‘You know who I mean. Dawley. He was the beginning of our troubles.’

‘I never thought of it like that.’

‘You never do. But if we hadn’t got to know him, John wouldn’t have had the hair-brained idea of going off to Algeria to pull him out of that war. He wouldn’t have set the house on fire as a parting gift.’

‘He would still have been a sick man,’ Handley said. ‘Bad in the head.’

‘But good in the heart. He’d still have been alive.’

‘You worked it out too bloody pat.’

‘It’s true, though,’ she said patiently.

‘I suppose you brooded on it long and good about Dawley?’

‘It occurred to me, Albert.’

‘In one blinding moment?’

‘Yes, Albert.’

‘Because he’s my friend?’

‘Oh don’t be daft.’

‘This is all I need: somebody to turn me against my friends.’

‘That’s not my idea, Albert.’

‘What is, then? I expect you’re still working it out.’

He walked to the window. ‘Your honesty appals me. It’ll be the death of me. And don’t keep saying Albert like that. When you do I know you’re up to no good.’

She stood, flushed red. ‘The only time you have a good word for me is when I tell you there’s something to eat on the table, or when you want me to open my legs at night.’

‘What else can I do? I’ve got to do this painting. It brings the money in.’

‘Money! You never used to say that. You thought you hadn’t got enough on your shoulders with a wife and seven children so you had to take on this community as well. But I know why you did it.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘You want me to?’

‘Get on with it.’

‘To be close to Myra, that’s why. You made it out you were full of high principles, wanting to find a new way of life, make a pattern for others and a framework for yourself, and all that bloody rubbish, but you can’t fool me. I’d rather you got caught up in politics than this. I know you’re in love with her.’

He trembled with rage at her accuracy. Subtlety was never one of his strong points, and so he’d always underestimated hers — out of laziness mostly, because he didn’t doubt his own ability to be subtle with those he thought too clever for him.

‘It’s nothing but an old man’s folly,’ she shouted, ‘I should have known it would come to this. You’d send us all to the wall for a single flick of your randy tail. You disgust me. Oh I can take it, to a certain extent. And I have done these last months, but now and again it gets too much.’

Her agitation shook him to the marrow. He picked up a brush, worked it round a mustard-glass of red paint. He threw the whole lot like a hand grenade — smash through the window, leaving a comet-tail of paint behind. He had lost the ability to quarrel, the art of give-and-take, the humanity of living repartee that was full of love even when steeped in hate. He felt like a rock about to be finally loosened from the sandgrip and swept away. There was a point at which you must shift and flee, and now that the time had come he was unable to do anything. He must get away from her, because if he only breathed, or lit a cigarette, or put food in his mouth, it was to spite her. If he went on living she thought it was only to spite her. Yet to walk away would be the final injustice also — to spite her. Even if he was prepared to commit this injustice he would still be unable to walk away. He was beginning to feel that his spirit was broken.

‘You can’t answer me because you’re tongue-tied by your own black guilt,’ she went on. ‘But I’m not asking you to be guilty. That’s not what I want at all.’

According to the ritual this was the moment for her voice to soften, and start to blame herself, and Handley felt it was time either to walk away or kiss her. The idea of the community had been fine, as he told her now, to try and extend the limits of the family with a few select friends, and not for the reason she imagined. He had no wish to turn it into a graveyard of crushed desires, neither for her nor for him nor for anybody. It was a good scheme that could still succeed, and he was determined to go on trying, if he could get the necessary co-operation. Even if he didn’t he would continue working for the commune, because he realised it was in their best interests, and that was the only thing that mattered as far as he was concerned.

‘You’re not at a meeting now,’ she said wryly, an impatient wave. ‘You’ll have me cheering in a bit. Or crying. I don’t know which.’

He laughed, all blackness gone, easy again, and no one knew the reason. He kissed her, and they went down the garden path to see if Myra had finished making lunch. They had gone up the garden path hand in hand many years ago, and had been walking up and down it continually since, and neither of them knew how to get off it.